Kapil Sibal’s exam plan splits IITs

IIT Delhi and Bombay could back IIT Kanpur in holding their own entrance test while Madras, Roorkee, Kharagpur & Guwahati will stand by govt’s decision.

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: The HRD ministry's decision to hold an all-inclusive common engineering test appears to have split the Indian Institutes of Technology vertically.

Indications are that IIT Delhi and Bombay could back IIT Kanpur in holding their own entrance test while Madras, Roorkee, Kharagpur and Guwahati will stand by the Centre's decision.

If the current wave of resentment among faculty, which gathered momentum on Saturday, a day after IITK's decision, is backed by their respective senates, it would add to the raft of entrance tests students take after their boards.

IITK's senate called the HRD ministry's decision on admissions "academically and methodically unsound".

Faculty members in Delhi and Bombay also expressed resentment that the concerns raised by them, including the 2014 roll-out, were not addressed by the HRD ministry.

All India IIT Faculty Federation secretary Prof A K Mittal said, "The IIT Kanpur's decision should not be seen in isolation. We are talking to all IITs and there is resentment among them on the fact that the IITs will not conduct their own exam and that the introduction has been scheduled for 2013 despite our reservations on the preparedness."

"I am sad that they have to take this extreme step for such a small matter. Right now, we are not talking about one common entrance test. We are basically talking about having a common exam for NITs, IITs and IIITs. Whether this leads to a common exam for everybody, only time will tell," he said.

His IIT Kharagpur counterpart Damodar Acharya said the institution did not have any objection to the Centre's move.